Bill Clinton Enlisted By Obama to Promote U.S. Health Law
By Alex Wayne - Aug 28, 2013 1:13 PM ET .
Bill Clinton agreed to lend his weight to President Barack Obama’s effort at educating people about the U.S. health-care overhaul, a helping hand needed to combat confusion as key parts of the law begin Oct. 1.
Clinton, a two-term U.S. president who left office in 2001, will promote the Affordable Care Act in a Sept. 4 speech from his museum in Little Rock, Arkansas, according to a statement today from his philanthropic foundation. A White House aide, Dan Pfeiffer, welcomed Clinton’s help and quipped on Twitter that the former president is “the Secretary of Explaining Stuff.”
Obama has called on the former president’s star power before, including during his 2012 re-election campaign. Clinton appeared at high-dollar fundraising events and in campaign ads that culminated in a rousing speech to the Democratic National Convention that helped to clarify Obama’s economic policies and accomplishments for independent and undecided voters.
“He generally is very effective at what people call retail politics; talking about things as they directly affect people’s lives,” Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said in a telephone interview.
The challenge now is to surmount political opposition and public confusion about the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the largest regulatory overhaul of health care since the 1960s. More than 40 percent of people remain unsure whether the law is still on the books, according to a poll today by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit based in Menlo Park, California.
more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-28/bill-clinton-enlisted-by-obama-to-promote-u-s-health-law.html
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